One of the most ordinary things we use every day is water. We can't do without it.
Most of us have it available with very little effort. We just turn the tap or lift the lever and the water flows. When it is so easy to obtain, it is easy to take it for granted. We also think very little about what happens to our water when it goes down the drain. We might suppose that it just disappears, like when we throw something away we are just "shud of it." We may suppose that it just doesn't exist any more. But, throw-a-way things do go somewhere, and water down the drain goes somewhere else, and keeps going somewhere else.
When I was growing up we got our water on the farm from a dug well not far from the house. A dug well is made by digging it, not by drilling it. Usually dug wells are three feet or so in diameter, and lined with rocks. A person can climb down into the well if need be, somewhat as the person who originally dug the well climbed down in it several times in the process of digging. We drew our water by letting down a bucket with a rope tied to the bail, allowing the bucket to fill, and then drawing it back up by pulling the rope. We always kept a bucket of fresh water sitting by the kitchen sink, with the dipper nearby or laid across the top of the bucket. Our well supplied really good water; there just was not a whole lot of water available there.
When farm electricity came out our way in 1945, we immediately put an electric pump in the well to supply water to the house and farmstead. We put in pipes to the house, to the barn, to the chicken houses, and faucets in the lawn. Having running water was really a big deal. It saved all those trips to the well and carrying buckets of water everywhere. We soon learned, though, that our well had a limited capacity, and we could pretty easily pump it dry. I remember one summer my cousin from California was visiting with us for several days, and a day or two into her stay she decided to take a bath. She turned on the water to fill the bathtub. That is, she turned on the water, to FILL the bathtub. We never filled our bathtub for a bath. The well didn't have enough water in it to fill the bathtub to full. We were accustomed to filling the tub to about six inches deep, and doing our baths that way. My cousin was accustomed to FILLING the tub for a bath. Well, Mom came to me, saying, Jerry, she's FILLING the bathtub, you better go shut off the well pump or she'll pump the well dry. So, that's what I did.
The well was dependable, and would fill back up in an hour or so, but you couldn't just pump out water willy nilly. The underground stream that supplied the well was small, and the well basin was small, so we had to get water not too fast.
I often think how important it was when our settlers were coming into this area that they found sources of water. The earliest settlements took advantage of springs, streams and often dug wells to supply their need for water. For example, we think Pea Ridge started in the stretch of today's Greene Street at the bottom of the hill near the west edge of old downtown. The spring there is not large, but in the earlier days it could have supplied water for several households. Also, to the northeast of that spring is the Morrison Spring, a larger spring which is the main enduring supply for Otter Creek. Otter Creek runs from Pea Ridge to Big Sugar Creek just over the Missouri line, passing through our family farm on its way there.
In the 1800s, as people were coming into southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas, many of the creeks became power resources. Joe C. Shell, who once was the postmaster at Powell, Mo., tells in a book he wrote about life in this Ozarks area that over the years there were numerous water-powered mills on Big Sugar Creek. These mills were for grinding and milling flour and other grains to supply the needs of local families. Of course in those days you didn't have your food shipped in from California and Florida and Texas and Brazil. You grew the grain in your fields, harvested it, and hauled the wheat or oats or barley to the local mill to have them process it into usable flour for baking your bread and biscuits and making crusts for your blackberry pies. I don't know of any of those old mills that are still intact on Big Sugar.
There are remnants of one of the larger mills at a small place called Cyclone, over near Pineville, Mo. Joe Shell's stories about the old mills seemed to go in a pattern.
First he would describe how so-and-so established a new mill in a certain place and operated there for a few years. Then the creek flooded and washed the mill away. This was the story for mill after mill after mill. We also see that kind of history at War Eagle Mill. War Eagle mill has been rebuilt many times over long years, and high water on the creek is always a threat to mills like this.
Our Otter Creek also gets up and raging when we have rains such as we have had this spring. The Otter Creek watershed is large, including all of Pea Ridge, as well as the fields reaching out between Pea Ridge and the National Military Park, along with many small springs and little creeks feeding into it along the way to Missouri. We are running into erosion problems on our farm, which is at about half-way to Missouri, and we are using chunk rocks to try to stabilize the areas that want to wash away. Water has power in many ways, and it can be hard to corral.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@ centurytel.net , or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 06/03/2020